Bill Clinton hosts Boris Yeltsin at the White Hiuse not bombed. 1995.
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'Corn Pop' Putin Takes on Joe 'Pop Corn' Biden, the Chain Gangster
by John Kendall Hawkins
I guess we should have known that bullshit was ahead when The Presider Joe Biden started telling a 'Corn Pop' story about an earlier encounter with naked-from-the-waist-up-on-horseback Vladimir Putin. As the reader will remember, Corn Pop was a mouthy derelict African-American who had to be castigated for his public swimming pool antics that Lifeguard Joe took umbrage to, leading to Corn Pop being evicted, him threatening to meet Joe in the parking lot, whereupon three young hoodlums from the housing project across the road confronted Joe with switchblades -- but he was ready, a mate (presumably white) had given him a length of chain that he says he twirled in such a way that they skedaddled back to Jericho (nothing triggers a Black man like a length of chain held out by a white man with power, or a lifeguard who doesn't want to save them). He actually recounted this tale to a gathering of Black people. I don't know why. Nobody does.
In the latest iteration, just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Uncle Joe recalled the time he said he'd gone "toe to toe" with the blackbelt president from Russia, looked him in the eye and saw "no soul." (Jesus. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.) And later when folks from the media asked if his suggestion that he might not do much if there was just "a little intrusion" across the border by Putin didn't amount to appeasement and capitulation to the Klingnons. Biden essentially responded with, "You're a lying dog-faced pony soldier." That shut up the lapdog press. Mitch McConnell later added that the invasion was made possible by Biden's pusillanimous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Ouch. If only we'd stayed the course and spent trillions more money for nothing, and not even the chicks were free. A vacuum cleaner opened up. Mitch was twirling the chain of events at Biden. Another con artist.
Old Europe. One Hundred Years War. Westphalia. Nation-States. Sovereignty. Stability. Giddy governance. All out of the new light of the Magna Carta and the evolution of the Rule of Law. Settling scores by Justice, rather Just Is. Words pricked up their ears like meerkats and were important again. Lefties got to work tweaking away until we had Enlightenment and Modernity and Ruskin's Cathedrals. Important proclamations were made. sh*t still happened over the years, lots of backsliding due to monsters that rise to the occasion when we turn on the vacuum cleaner. Folks got themselves defenestrated. Zarathustra killed God. Then WWI. We made a comeback with the League of Nations, knowing that after the War to End All Wars we couldn't keep going that way. Gloomy Freud, Civilization and its Discontents. Then they fucked us on Wall Street. WW2. The UN, aka League of Nations 2.0, was set up. Never Again, the whole world said. No, no, we meant it this time. We'll let a world governing body make sure that nobody crosses the Imaginot line and steals anybody else's family jewels ever again. And such a body would come in handy if we ever had to globally decide on what to do should, say, an Earth-crushing meteor, or similar catastrophe, be heading our way. Just don't look up.
Then the Lefties got us in trouble with all their fine words. Especially the Commies, we said, whose 'intellectuals' couldn't agree on how to interpret Marx and bored progressives to tears in the process. Ideologies and sleeping dogmas woke. The barking of mad dogs. Bones of contention were snapped at. A rumble was waiting. West Side Story as East versus West. McCarthy started waterboarding witches. J. Edgar started wearing dresses. You could hear the vacuum starting up. Then the postmodernists arrived and beat the sh*t out of the Canonists. Eliot wrote The Wasteland from which Marlon Brando would later quote in Apocalypse Now: The horror, the horror. Ginsburg's Howl. God became Godot. Churches were gutted and turned into Computer Centers. Debt slavery. Middle Class erosions. Ordinary people feeling lost, the bright, bonny Lefty words of the Enlightenment now sounding like a Djingo Unchained.
All that background noise -- at least for this reader-response theorist -- leads us somehow to Putin's invasion of Zelensky's crib. Anybody with sense knew that when Putin started riding horses shirtless that it was a metaphor for invasion -- shame on us if we were caught navel-gazing -- at his navel. Zelensky, the TV comedian turned president, and oligarchy's best kept secret, has a lot to answer for. He just doesn't know it yet, onnacounta he had no previous political experience of any kind before his rise and was just acting to get the job. Zelensky played such a clean cut guy on TV in Servant of the People that Ukrainians apparently thought they'd give fake honesty a go over the comprehensive and omnipresent national corruption. One of those detergent promises that never gets past the saucy jingles of its advertisements. But stronger than dirt???
In February 1990, the US made promises they had no intention of keeping: No NATO east. The famous quip from U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was "there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east." This is a key point of the Warsaw Pact. Russia said Never Again to Napoleons and Hitlers and Neoliberals coming to their doorstep on the Eastern Front. No more Leningrads or Stalingrads or Harvard business grads. But greedy industrialists were already drooling at the prospect of despoiling Russia, and nothing symbolized their intentions better than the opening of the first McDonald's in Moscow with a line circling for long blocks:
Hungry eyes for material goodness arrived. The Gold Rush was on.
In a PBS NewsHour piece a few days ago, "Why NATO and Ukraine are a flash point with Russia 30 years after the end of the Cold War," Baker's quote is debated, with Americans heard backing off in weasel-like fashion from the NATO expansion question. After the Soviet Union collapsed following the fall of the Wall, and their Afghanistan presence ended, and Gorbachev was chased from office, the Clinton administration began grooming Boris Yeltsin. In 1993, Clinton began working a grift:
Clinton chose to develop a new NATO initiative called the Partnership for Peace (PfP), which would be nonexclusive and open to all former Warsaw Pact members, as well as non-European countries"However, Clinton soon began speaking publicly about expanding NATO's membership, saying in Prague just days after the launch of PfP that "the question is no longer whether NATO will take on new members but when and how."
Expansion could only mean eastward. With Yeltsin, the Clown, in office, essentially unelected, and keeping Clinton in laughs (seemingly as long as Clinton kept him in vodka), all the US had to do was keep him in office. National humiliation and all.
Arguably, with Yeltsin in office, the Americans came up with a plan to make NATO expansion unnecessary. They just needed to get Yeltsin re-elected in 1996. The problem was that he was by then deeply unpopular, his charm had faded with the post-Wall euphoria, and so American advisers were called in -- for $250,000 to them and millions more for Yeltsin cronies --to shore up his run for "re-election." The stagger was re-told in the film Spinning Boris (2003), starring Jeff Goldblum, Liev Schreiber, and Anthony LaPaglia. The film's descriptor blurb tells it all:
"Russian political elite hires American consultants to help with President Yeltsin's re-election campaign when his approval rating is down to single digits."
The film is largely based on a cover story in Time magazine on July 15, 1996 -- "Yanks To The Rescue," which goes into the meddling process in great detail and is well worth a read. In one notable section the piece asks,
Why, with unlimited funds, expert advice and the media in his pocket, did Yeltsin win the first round by only three points? The Americans identify several points, [including the most important]:
The continuing underlying hostility toward Yeltsin. "He never overcame the fact that most Russians can't stand him," says [Richard] Dresner. "Anyone but a communist would have beaten him."
Dresner is a longtime associate of the Clintons, who helped get him elected governor of Arkansas in 1978. Had the US been able to work the grift successfully -- who knows, maybe NATO would be in Moscow now. But Yeltsin left office suddenly and was replaced with Vladimir Putin, who clearly was sick and tired of Yeltsin's nation-degrading Curly Spin political antics.
Twenty years later, some analysts say that the Americans did it again when the Ukraine coup of 2014, orchestrated by the CIA, installed Petro Poroshenko, who lasted until 2019. In a piece titled, "Yanks To the Rescue 2.0," Edward Lozansky, president of the American University in Moscow, Jim Jatras, a former U.S. diplomat, remind the reader of the recent US Intelligence Community (IC) mischief in Ukraine (and the region). They quote the former head of the CIA, James Woolsey, who is quoted as telling Fox News that "the US does interfere in foreign elections but 'only for a good cause.'" They add, "Maybe he had Russia 1996 fondly in mind and electing Boris was one such good cause." And their push to install Poroshenko was a disaster for Ukrainians. The authors tells us,
Poroshenko's one big "achievement," besides enriching himself, has been to obtain visa-free travel for Ukrainians to the European Union. But the main result has been depopulation of Ukraine as people "vote with their feet" in adesperate bid to find work abroad. One in six Ukrainians of working age now migrate to Europe to work"Around four million others are working in Russia, which Poroshenko calls an aggressor three times a day".
That's something, if true, when you can so discourage your own countrymen that they leave in the millions to seek a better life elsewhere. The authors say that by the time Poroshenko left office, having absconded with billions of dollars, he had an 80% disapproval rating.
But the authors save their best for last. In 2014, the corrupt Ukrainian parliament voted to end its alignment neutrality and seek entry into NATO and the EU. At that time, Joe Biden was VP and Ukraine was his portfolio, as we have discovered during the Burisma Gas fiasco and follow-on charade. Biden met with Poroshenko in November 2014, just before the parliament voted, and shook hands with good pal Poroshenko. Lozansky and Jatras see this vote as a major catastrophe for future relations with Russia. They wrote:
Finally, Ukraine's constitution recently was amended by a parliament with a 93% disapproval rating to replace the country's nonaligned status with aspirations for full membership in NATO - a virtual guarantee of a hot war with Russia and possibly World War III.
You can't get much stronger than that. Corn Pop, my ass! Unchain my heart.
Installing Yeltsin, Poroshenko and probably Zelensky, the Americans have arguably brought this on themselves and the world. They are intent on getting Ukraine to be part of the NATO alliance, as it fits on with their geopolitical expansionist plans. There has been plenty of talk in the US media of Russia's hacking of US infrastructure and electoral processes, including essentially blaming them for the Colonial pipeline ransomware farce (see my piece) last year. However, the US has been mighty busy -- and crowing about it -- hacking into the Russian infrastructure. In a June 2019 NYT piece, "U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia's Power Grid," the paper of record discusses some very serious incursions conducted by John Bolton and the Trump Administration that amped up tensions between America and Russia -- seemingly needlessly:
Since at least 2012, current and former officials say, the United States has put reconnaissance probes into the control systems of the Russian electric grid.
But now the American strategy has shifted more toward offense, officials say, with the placement of potentially crippling malware inside the Russian system at a depth and with an aggressiveness that had never been tried before. It is intended partly as a warning, and partly to be poised to conduct cyberstrikes if a major conflict broke out between Washington and Moscow.
So, will we now see a full-fledged cyberwar? Sputnik - Stuxnet. Last year, the first vaccine out for Covid-19 was Russia's Sputnik. Almost a wink at us. Why you, I'll murderize you, as Curly would say.
I'm no Putin fan, believe you me, but I can see where enough of the bullshit might be enough. How arrogant, he might be thinking, that they get to have their sphere of influence but we're supposed to cool our heels. And now we see why PopCorn Joe didn't interfere with the completion of Nord 2 when he had a chance. He could f*ck with it later and force Germany and Europe to hairy knuckle under as part of a European sanctions package aimed at punishing the man they call Vlad. On Friday, Newsweek reported on a Zelensky tweet with Biden that projected more support for Ukraine. He twittered:
Zelensky announced on Twitter that he and Biden discussed tougher sanctions on Friday, as well as "concrete defense assistance and an anti-war coalition." The Ukrainian leader said that he was "grateful" for the support from the United States.
Although the piece quickly adds that especially severe sanctions have not yet been triggered:
the president held back from issuing two harsh measures: sanctioning Putin himself or kicking Russia out of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) banking system.
It remains to be seen how European sanctions will play out against their need for Russian oil and gas for nation-states there to function normally.
For those of us paying much attention, SWIFT is the US State Department's preferred method for making the economies of other nation-states scream. In addition to dropping bombs, American can use SWIFT to make transnational business transactions almost impossible to proceed -- funds can't be sent or received throught the banking systems. Medicine can't be purchased for children and they die and the US knows they will and they do it to foment regime change. Out of such actions, Madeleine Albright once quipped, when asked by journo if such behavior was worth it: "We think it's worth it." America controls the world reserve currency, and, along with SWIFT 'foreclosures' can neutralize any opponent in the world over time. If you've ever had a Credit Report problem you know how stressful and debilitating such loss of 'stature' can be. The question is: Who the f*ck is America to go around closing accounts unilaterally. Shouldn't this be the job of the UN?
But America has no use for the UN as anything other than a rubber stamp, when required, for its Marilyn Monroe Doctrine of spreading its sexy product everywhere they can find a fan blowing up from the sidewalk. More gangster stuff. More bullshit. A decent recent example came when the NSA tried to get its equivalent in the UK, GCHQ, to find dirt on members of the UN security council to twist their arms just before the vote on the US invasion of Iraq. The UN voted No. The US went in anyway: Like many gangsters, they just wanted an official cover story for what they knew would be war crimes ahead.
This was all covered in the film, Official Secrets (2019). The film was based on the whistleblowing account of Katherine Gun at GCHQ who, she said, was offended to see her country dragged into an unnecessary war (no one was being threatened by Iraq) that would result in millions murdered. The US presentation before the UN, led by the earnest Colin Powell, turned out to be a fraud and deceit about WMD. The UK began to go after Gun, who announced an intention of using the Necessity Defense (not available in the UK legal system) -- and arguing it through the Press, which would have aired some ugly laundry, and the case against Gun was dropped. Shhhhh. A Necessity Defense would see Assange released and ED Snowden on his way home. HINT.
Along with SWIFT, America has abused its privilege of maintaining the world's global currency reserve. There's an old slogan you used to see in greasy spoons: "In God we trust, all others pay cash." This has been similar to the American posture. Their dollars bear the slogan In God We Trust, which implies that their IOUs on paper -- cash and bonds -- can be trusted (You believe me, don't you?). You, on the other hand, can't, and must pony up at the register. Or as Indian investor and author of The Rise and Fall of Nations, Ruchir Sharma, wrote in 2019,
It also helped create the American "elite." Now all we need's a Robespierre. And a Marat. And a Bunuel to film it all.
Reserve currency status had long been a perk of imperial mightand an economic elixir. By generating a steady flow of customers who want to hold the currency, often in the form of government bonds, it allows the privileged country to borrow cheaply abroad and fund a lifestyle well beyond its means." Sharma adds: "And for nearly a century now this privilege has helped to keep US interest rates low, making it possible for Americans to buy cars and homes and, in recent decades, run large government deficits that they could not otherwise afford. [cited in Has China Won? by Kishore Mahbubani, p.50]
Russian Dolls and China Dollars
As it turns out, both the SWIFT system and the world reserve currency question are beginning to be resisted. And countries are fighting back against the perceived arrogant American hegemonic money controlling. BRICS -- Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- have explored ways of getting around the US dominance. In a June 2009 Reuters story, "Dollar slides after Russia comments, BRIC summit," the stock market got spooked by the Russian call for a new global economy:
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday that existing reserve currencies, including the dollar, have not performed their function, and a new supranational currency was in the making.
These kinds of comments themselves might have led to the CIA backing a coup in Ukraine five years later. In addition, China has begun to push its own currency as reserve (see "Exclusive: China's international payments system ready, could launch by end-2015 - sources.") And if that weren't enough, Europe, too, wants to break away from the US reserve stranglehold. Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's ex-ambassador to the UN wrote in his recent book, Has China Won? that the future of the world reserve was up for grabs:
INSTEX represents a huge shift in the international system. For the first time, three major allies of America (France, Germany, and the UK) have created an alternative to the US dollar based payment system. It could one day serve as a model for two future potential adversaries of America (China and Russia) to set up an alternative global channel of payments that would bypass and undercut the global role of the US dollar.
The US is only shooting itself in the foot when it squeezes the economies of other nation-states, incentivizing a change.
This talk of replacing the dollar as the reserve currency is terrifying to the US government. Imagine going from the Amex gold card back to the green card. Don't leave home without it. One day you're Karl Malden with the meaningful schnozz and next day your Pinocchio -- also with the schnozz. So anybody who threatens this privilege has to die -- according to gangster rules. Longtime crosstown rivals China and Russia are working the Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend routine. If America wants to f*ck with the well-being and lifestyles of other nation-states, like some f*cking goon, then they reserve (get it) the right to f*ck back. But also, maybe horuspicators of zeitgeists in China and Russia compared notes on their reads of Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, wherein he scares us by revealing that the American nuclear plan in case of a war with Russia is to take out China, too, even if things are cool between us at the time. (See my review of Ellsberg's book.) Presumably, if we do China, we do Russia at the same time, too (a + b = b + a). They are both Communists. And that's terrorism. Bye-bye.
In "Saudi-Russia Collusion Is Driving Up Gas Prices -- and Worsening Ukraine Crisis," The Intercept is reporting that Russia and Saudi Arabia have made a deal to drive up oil prices that will Khashoggi the American lifestyle. (This is what we get for forgiving the Saudis for their role in 9/11 -- more rolling pearlharbors.) The inimitable Greg Palast has recently suggested that America could get around such an arrangement by undoing a scream they placed on Venezuela, releasing all its now gorgeous oil to the marketplace, bring prices down to save the American lifestyle. Why they would do so, after we tried to crack their hairy walnuts with sanctions -- causing their modest lifestyle to nosedive -- Palast doesn't say. Do the Vs have an ironically superior moral compass than Americans? When they get slapped in the left nut sack are they supposed to then show us their right? Cue the theme from The Exorcist, "Ganglia Bells"?
During the siege of Venezuela's oil riches (as with Iran many years ago, the sanctions came after a nationalization of the country's oil) China has gleefully stepped in to be a conduit with a spigot at the other end. (See "Venezuela's Evolving Relationship with China.") Folks ain't gonna take it anymore. China is Venezuela's number 1 customer and helping to pave that New Silk Road. All aboard the Disorient Express. These desires by other nations for such significant change in the system could bring about fantastic new religious experiences for the Yanquis. Have your bongs ready on the Left; it's gonna be a smoky ride ahead.
America Fucked and Fracked
It may seem surprising for China and Russia to be "united" against the bogeyman in broad daylight, the elephant who brings his own room, the je ne sais quoi of terror, the USA, my beloved homeland. It's said that we Americans used to be all about pacifism and had to be goaded into caring about the excesses of the world. We needed Lusitanias and Pearl Harbors and Tonkin Bays to get our asses into gear to fight for the Elite's values, which is to say money. And postmodernism gave the Elites something to work with -- a "multinational multiculturalism" they could send Willy Loman out on the road again with. What was meant to loosen up the rigidity of our values turned into "Humanitarian Interventionism," as James Woolsey would say, and as Kissinger remarked before Chile's fall:
I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
Hey, isn't that what Nancy Pelosi about the 2020 election? (No, I'm not saying 'voter fraud,' only that they seem to have counted all the votes this time.)
There's lots of gnashing of teeth and lamentations going on out there right now. Mahbubani quotes the scholar John Mearsheimer regarding the opportunity America had after the Wall fell and threw away For Am Ugly Fistful of a Few Dollars More. It's worth considering Mearsheimer's take, quoted from his The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and international Realities (2018):
With the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States emerged as by far the most powerful country on the planet. Unsurprisingly, the Clinton administration embraced liberal hegemony from the start, and the policy remained firmly intact through the Bush and Obama administrations. Not surprisingly, the United States has been involved in numerous wars during this period and has failed to achieve meaningful success in almost all of those conflicts. Washington has also played a central role in destabilizing the greater Middle East, to the great detriment of the people living there. Liberal Britain, which has acted as Washington's faithful sidekick in these wars, also bears some share of the blame for the trouble the United States has helped cause. American policymakers also played the key role in producing a major crisis with Russia over Ukraine. At this writing, that crisis shows no signs of abating and is hardly in America's interest, let alone Ukraine's.
It's all been foreseeable for a while now.
Where did we go wrong? The Lefties didn't go wrong. Their just meant less and less over time until they began to taper off altogether, to fade under the new reality that We, the People of the Planet are ruled by monsters who have no pretty poems to write about Nature (she's there to be whored and cankered), no unifying theory about the future of humankind, no desire to sit quietly in a Cathedral and ponder the mind that thought it up and the generations of families who actually built it, who, in short, just don't give a sh*t.
Maybe the mistake is believing that we are all of the same species. The controversial Clement Vallandigham, a Copperhead, who went on to inspire "The Man Without a Country," a short story by Edward Everett Hale, about the consequences of anti-patriotism that was forced down young American throats in elementary school, said back in 1864 of slavers:
Certainly, sir, there are two white races in the United States, both from the same common stock, and yet so distinct -- one of them so peculiar -- that they develop different forms of civilization, and might belong, almost, to different types of mankind.
We are still fighting the slavers. And Francis Fuk-yo-mama had it all wrong with his comic book thesis on Hegel: It's not the end of history and the "triumph" of Capitalism is not the same as the historical arrival at Absolute Spirit. The War on Terrorism was always going to lead back to that old chestnut cause Communism. Fukuyama and the "Clash of Civilizations" guy were just admen for further commercial conquests. Jingoists. Like so many of us have become, accepting The Lesser of Two Evils as a practical political philosophy with the depth we used to have in choosing between Pepsi and Coke, the "new generation" vs. "the real thing." Both of them colluding to beat the thit out my fave 7Up.
Our contemporary slavers have given us all the major problems of the world today -- Chomsky's Three: Nukes, Climate Change, End of Democracy -- and have so undermined the global body -- the United Nations -- that we have no viable unifying system to address these emergencies soberly, and now wring our hands over the obvious predictable rise of authoritarianism and populism everywhere, while the "separate race" continues to blithely Make A Buck off all the rolling pearlharbors ahead that they seeded with their profound selfishness.
Who knows where this will all end. That's rhetorical: There is no expected answer. But I can envision a deal in the future where the US makes a solid promise to never ever ever ever again push for NATO expansion into Ukraine -- ever -- in exchange for the handing over of Edward Snowden, enema of the people of America, according to leaders so full of sh*t that roses are sprouting from their pampered behinds. But the real problem is America's unwillingness to keep its promises and hold to negotiated deals.
The Russians might give us Snowden to snot-kick in court and we might give them a new Clownshow Yeltsin to make the Yankee Doodles guffaw in the Rose Garden. But chances are it all ends, as T.S. Eliot put it decades ago, not with a bang but a whimper. Although a bang would probably be more humane at this point. After all, who wants to go back to living in caves, the way they pondered in that scene from Dr. Strangelove -- the film Daniel Ellsberg glibly called a documentary.
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